MIT Comparative Media Studies: News

CMS grad Huma Yusuf's article points to resolution

2008-06-26T13:54:47Z

Writing today after a two-month hiatus, I am moved to think about solutions rather than problems. Perhaps this burst of positivism can be attributed to the fact that the weather in Boston is finally pleasant, after a long, bitterly cold winter and a short, stifling heat wave. Perhaps the prospect of seeing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaign together at the end of this week in a bid to unify a divided Democratic party is making me optimistic and foolhardy enough to think that under extenuating circumstances (like a tense presidential race) even enemies can find something in common. Perhaps seeing Pakistan splashed across international newspaper headlines in the past few weeks, rarely in a positive context, is making me feel desperate enough to think outside the box. Whatever the reason, I'm going to use the following paragraphs to suggest that Dr A Q Khan might help diffuse mounting tensions between Pakistan and the US as well as Afghanistan.

Read full text of CMS Grad Huma Yusuf's article "Greater Transparency in Policymaking Remediation" here.

Junot Diaz on the Colbert Report

2008-06-19T14:41:46Z

Junot Diaz talks about his Pulitzer Prize winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on The Colbert Report. Click here to watch the interview.

William Uricchio to present learned lessons from GAMBIT at GLS 4.0

2008-06-18T15:25:19Z

William Uricchio, the co-director of Comparative Media Studies and a lead principal investigator for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, will present a selection of lessons learned from the lab's first year in existence at the fourth Games, Learning and Society Conference July 10-11 in Madison, Wisconsin. From the conference's website:

Can we make a game that can be played equally by sighted and sightless players (AudiOdyssey)? How do we make a multiplayer game where the collective behavior of the players shapes the simulation (Backflow)? These are some of the research challenges presented by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in their 5-year initiative to bridge the cultures of engineering and humanities. GAMBIT Game Lab incorporates academic researchers into the process of game development, and provides a space for researchers to work across and learn from both Eastern and Western cultures. In this fireside chat, William Uricchio, a lead principal investigator of GAMBIT Game Lab, will share the techniques and strategies that have been particularly effective... and those that were not. How does this project compare with other cross-disciplinary game development initiatives, like the Dutch GATE project? Where are they going from here?

More about Uricchio can be found at http://cms.mit.edu/people or at http://www.glsconference.org/2008/person.html?id=326; more about the Comparative Media Studies program can be found at http://cms.mit.edu and more about the Singapore-MIT Game Lab can be found at http://gambit.mit.edu.

William Uricchio to give keynote at European Network for Cinema and Media Studies conference

2008-06-05T16:57:40Z

William Uricchio will speak about new directions in archiving-- social tagging, access, recycling
and the broader implications for the interaction between history and memory-- in his opening keynote for European Network for Cinema and Media Studies in Budapest, Hungary. Founded in February of 2006, NECS brings together scholars and researchers in the field of cinema, film and media studies with archivists and film and media professionals who share a common interest in academic film study and the preservation, distribution and programming of film and media art and the film heritage. Click here for more information.

Henry Jenkins on NPR

2008-06-05T14:28:21Z

Henry Jenkins speaks on the qualities of 'Mr. Spock'. Click here for full text and audio.

C4 / Communications Conversation

2008-05-27T14:16:13Z

The Center for Future Civic Media is collaborating with the MIT Communications Forum to host an ongoing series of conversations about media and civic engagement. Click here for full article.

Remembering Los Angeles in the Digital Age: Pat O'Neill's The Decay of Fiction

2008-05-17T10:00:00Z

Los Angeles artist and special effects virtuoso Pat O'Neill filmed The Decay of Fiction (2002) in the landmark Ambassador Hotel, once the center of Hollywood celebrity culture. His film blurs the boundaries between architectural investigation, urban documentation, and aesthetic exploration. At once a poetic homage to classical film genres, it is also a suggestive indication of how remembering the city is changing in response to new technologies. Edward Dimendberg is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and German at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004), co-editor of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (1994), and currently serves as Multimedia Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Forum: Youth and Civic Engagement

2008-05-16T10:00:00Z

The current generation of young citizens is growing up in an age of unprecedented access to information. Will this change their understanding of democracy? What factors will shape their involvement in the political process?

Lance Bennett is Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor of Communication and Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, where he founded and directs the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement.

Ingeborg Endter is the outreach manager for the MIT Center for Future Civic Media and a graduate of the electronic publishing group at MIT's Media Lab where her research focused on creating collaborative community uses of the Internet. She previously served as a program manager for the Computer Clubhouse Network, a collaboration between the Boston Museum of Science and Media Lab that provides an after-school learning environment where young people from under-served communities use technology for creative self-expression.

Alan Khazei co-founded City Year, which enlists more than 1,200 young adults, in 16 communities across America and in Johannesburg South Africa, for a year of full-time community service. He is currently founder and CEO of Be the Change, a non-partisan citizens' civic organization.

GAMBIT Creates Game for Visually Impaired

2008-05-15T17:41:13Z

A new computer game developed by MIT and Singaporean students makes it possible for visually impaired people to play the game on a level field with their sighted friends.

Read entire article here.

Sandbox Summit Advisory Board Announced

2008-05-15T17:33:42Z

Sandbox Summit, the organization created to explore how technology is affecting the ways kids play, learn and connect in today's digital world, has announced the formation of its first Advisory Board. The announcement comes as summer, the unofficial season of play, is about to begin. Drawing from a variety of fields, the roster of accomplished professionals includes academics, educators, policy makers and toy developers. The Sandbox Summit 2008 Advisory Board members include: Scot Osterweil, Creative Director, MIT Education Arcade, et al.

Read the entire article here.

Forum: Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

2008-05-15T10:15:00Z

Much discussion of our impending digital future is insular and without nuance. Skeptics talk mainly among themselves, while utopians and optimists also keep company mainly within their own tribal cultures. This forum challenges this unhelpful division, staging a conversation between Yochai Benkler and Cass Sunstein, two of our country's most thoughtful and influential writers on the promise and the perils of the Internet Age.

The Show Business High Wire Act: Walking the Tightrope Between Studio Filmmaking and Independent Production

2008-05-14T10:00:00Z

In the year 2008, artists and businesspersons navigate the vast divide between the world of independent filmmaking and the Hollywood studio system as the lines between the two become increasingly more blurred. As pop culture integration - the fusing of music, sports, dance, event programming, reality, and other subcultures geared toward mainstream audiences while highlighting the genre demographic - has become the lifeline for both the artistic and commercial filmmaker, where do you find the happy medium, or is there one anymore? Writer, producer, distributor, and president of Tri Destined Films, Gregory Anderson has been called a part of the "new" Oscar Micheaux movement as a trailblazer for independent film distribution. Gregory created Stomp the Yard, one of the most profitable dance films of all time, and produced, marketed, and theatrically distributed the independent film Trois, one of the Top 50 highest grossing Independent Films of its release year according to Daily Variety.

Slightly More Than Expected from a Band of Novelists: On How and Why a Group of Writers Called Wu Ming Set to Disrupt Italian (nay, European) Literature and Popular Culture (and then Came to Boston to Brag About It)

2008-05-13T18:54:18Z

Wu Ming 1 is a founding member and representative of the Wu Ming Foundation, a collective of writers from Italy. Most members of the collective were deeply involved in the Luther Blissett Project, an international experiment in culture jamming, radical pranksterism and guerrilla mythology that ran from 1994 to 1999. During that time, a group of LBP activists wrote a controversial novel titled Q, which was published to much acclaim in 1999. In January 2000 the authors of Q founded the Wu Ming Foundation, which takes its name from a Chinese word meaning either "anonymous" or "five names" depending on how the first syllable is pronounced. The name is meant both as a tribute to dissidents ("Wu Ming" is a common byline among Chinese citizens demanding democracy and freedom of speech) and as a refusal of the celebrity-making machine which turns authors into stars.

Henry Jenkins to speak at Games for Change conference in NYC

2008-05-13T18:30:00Z

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Chris Crawford (original founder of the GDC), Prof. Henry Jenkins (MIT), and Prof. James Paul Gee (University of Wisconsin-Madison) are all confirmed speakers for the upcoming Games for Change NYC conference, to be held June 3 and 4.
Games for Change is a conference about using video games and game technology for altruistic purposes.

Read the entire article here.

Eric Klopfer to receive Education Award from American Institute of Biological Sciences

2008-05-05T20:35:55Z

Eric Klopfer, Scheller Career Development Professor of Science Education and Educational Technology, Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP), and Co-Director of CMS research project The Education Arcade, will receive the Education Award on May 12 from the American Institute of Biological Sciences. The award is presented to an individual who has made significant contributions to education in the biological sciences, at any level of formal or informal education.

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